That's part of the NPR's conclusion when faced with the recently leaked documents about failed risk assessments, on the part of the Bush administration, of Guantanamo detainees.
NPR's Tom Gjelten, who's familiar with the documents, looks at cause and effect.
GJELTEN: U.S. commanders had another purpose in holding people at Guantanamo. They wanted to get intelligence from the detainees about any terrorist operations that were in the works. But the legal justification for Guantanamo was to keep combatants from going back to the fight, and the operation can be judged by that standard.
The record is not bad but hardly perfect. Two Saudis who were released from Guantanamo became leaders of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, now the most dangerous al-Qaida branch in the world. An Afghan went home and re-emerged as a top Taliban leader. A Kuwaiti was released from Guantanamo only to end up as a suicide bomber in Iraq.
Gjelten interviewed, among others, Thomas Wilner, lawyer for one of the detainees, who was dismayed by the process that led to a detainee being held.
Mr. THOMAS WILNER (Lawyer, Shearman& Sterling LLP): Nobody wants to release terrorists, and you really wanted a good review. What I found was that you had people collecting raw intelligence data and throwing it into a pot, and then people who are not trained analysts would look at it and say, oh, there's a lot of stuff here, so this guy must be a threat.
And indeed it appears that Guantanamo, in addition to holding detainees on the basis of poor risk assessments, it also created terrorists -- as many of us at the time suspected it would do.
GJELTEN: ... Abdallah al-Ajmi, the Iraq suicide bomber, was actually Wilner's client. It made sense, he says, that al-Ajmi was not seen as particularly threatening. When sent to Guantanamo, he was suspected only of having volunteered to fight with the Taliban. But Wilner says he was actually surprised when the government announced it was sending al-Ajmi back to Kuwait.
Mr. WILNER: I think he was not a terrorist caught up as terrorism before, but Guantanamo had turned this guy into a crazy sort of vegetable. He went from when I first met him to be a very nice, sweet kid, over a course of years to this wild, angry, angry person. And I was shocked.
Gjelten sum it up: "Unreliable intelligence, mistaken judgments, a haphazard transfer process: In the end, the Guantanamo documents may reveal less about the dangerousness of the people detained there than about than about the flaws of Guantanamo itself."
That's exactly what they reveal -- about the "dangerousness" of an administration that handled it. No maybe about it. These documents should not have been leaked. They should have come quite openly from a legitimate Department of Justice investigation of every aspect of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including how we got into them. Not having done this, the Obama administration made itself complicit in the wrongdoing. And members of the Republican party in Congress have disgraced themselves in their refusal to do right by the detainees.
